Grace stared at Wyatt, his shocking words still registering in her brain. A bird cried from a nearby tree as a cloud moved over the sun, cloaking the forest in shadow.
“Your mom was killed?” She didn’t want to press him. He almost seemed as if he wasn’t here at all. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was back there, back then, revisiting his worst nightmare.
“We were camping.” His tone was devoid of all emotion. “Spent a few days every summer doing that, me and my mom. Dad wasn’t much for the outdoors, but my mom... She loved it out here. We set up camp at sunset as usual. I gathered wood and helped her build a campfire. We ate beans and cornbread, and later we roasted marshmallows.”
Grace braced herself for what was coming next, her mind spinning withwhoandhowandwhy, feeling that if she knew the answers she could somehow change the outcome.
“We talked a lot that night by the fire. I wish I could remember what we talked about. Wish I’d known that was the last time I’d get the chance.”
Grace grasped his arm, holding on to him tightly.
“We settled into our sleeping bags as usual. I don’t even remember falling asleep. But the next thing I knew I woke up, and my momwas screaming. I saw a big shadow in the tent. I was so scared, I scurried into the corner. My mom was telling me to run, but I—I couldn’t move. I was frozen.
“The man was trying to take my mom—she was fighting him. But he had a gun. I heard the click when he cocked the hammer. He threatened to shoot me if she didn’t go with him... so she did. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. Wouldn’t have done any good anyway, I guess. Once he had her outside I could hear him dragging her deeper into the forest.” His words wobbled with emotion. “And then I couldn’t hear anything at all.”
Something in his story pricked some distant memory in Grace, but the urge to comfort him superseded it.
She gathered him close, pressed her face into the curve between his neck and shoulder. “Oh, Wyatt. How awful.”
“I just... sat there, Grace. In the tent. Safe in my little corner while that monster killed my mom.”
She leaned back to look at him, her throat aching. “You were just a little boy, Wyatt.”
Pain resided in the tightness of his face, in the road map of blood vessels in his eyes. “She needed my help and I did nothing.”
The words came reluctantly. As if it had taken everything in him to say them aloud. Had he ever said them to anyone before?
Oh, the poor baby. Grace took his face in her hands. “Wyatt, your mom loved you, and she wanted you safe. You did exactly what she wanted you to do.”
“I was a coward.”
She gave his head a shake. “No. You were smart. How would your mother have felt if you’d died trying to save her? And you surely would have—he was an adult male with a gun. There’s nothing you could’ve done that would’ve saved your mom.”
Her words didn’t seem to give him the solace she longed for himto have. “I understand guilt, Wyatt, and this kind of guilt is useless. It sucks the life out of you and gives nothing back. You need to let go of it. Ask God to take it away from you. It serves no good purpose, and He doesn’t want you carrying this burden.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“I know.” They were all the words she needed to hear herself, but she had been so inept at implementing them. “I know it’s not. But we both need to work on believing it, because it’s the truth.”
“I sat there for so long in the dark. At first light I left the tent and called for my mom, but no one answered. I thought maybe he’d kidnapped her. I went for help. I went back to the creek—to those boulders, and I followed the creek all the way back to town. I don’t even remember that walk back.”
He stared off into the woods. “They found the spot later that day—someone knew where those boulders were. They found my mom. He’d strangled her.”
A vise tightened around her heart. “I’m so sorry, Wyatt.”
“They caught him, at least, put him behind bars where he belonged. I later learned he’d been up this way and just happened to see our campfire. A crime of opportunity. He’d had an abusive mother and developed a real hatred for women. When his mom passed away he flipped out. He was quoted as saying, ‘I was going to kill the first female I saw, didn’t matter who.’”
The quote sent chills down Grace’s spine. She’d heard those words before. They were cemented in her memory because they were said by the man who’d nearly abducted her.
That meant Wyatt’s mother was Janet Jennings—the governor’s wife. The woman who’d been killed instead of Grace.
Her hands dropped to her sides, and she stepped away from Wyatt. She needed to think. Needed some distance. He was watching her closely, so she turned before he could read every thought in hermind. She took a few steps, pretended to observe the area while she tried to make sense of it all.
“Grace?”
His family had owned the inn—the governor’s summer home. Wyatt had never mentioned that, but it had to be true. His last name bore it out. Gordon Kimball had tried to abduct Grace on her way home from school that day. And when he’d failed, he hid in the woods where he’d stumbled upon another victim—a woman with a boy too young to protect her.
Grace’s gut churned with the revelation. If she hadn’t managed to evade the man, Janet Jennings’s life would’ve been spared. Wyatt would’ve been spared all these years of grief and guilt.
